


Fracture

by bunnyangel, mariana_oconnor, nightwideopen



Category: Marvel
Genre: Accidental Telepathy, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Clint Barton Needs a Hug, M/M, Post-Canon, Pre-Relationship, Pre-Slash, Soul Gem (Marvel), Winterhawk Round Robin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-23
Updated: 2019-02-23
Packaged: 2019-11-04 03:00:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17890259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bunnyangel/pseuds/bunnyangel, https://archiveofourown.org/users/mariana_oconnor/pseuds/mariana_oconnor, https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightwideopen/pseuds/nightwideopen
Summary: The one where Bucky is supposedly dead and Clint is apparently insane.





	Fracture

**Author's Note:**

> Props and thanks to our betas [flowerparrish](http://www.flowerparrish.tumblr.com/) and [drgrlfriend](http://www.drgrlfriend.tumblr.com/), and to the host [claraxbarton](http://claraxbarton.tumblr.com/post/182958707520/winterhawk-round-robin-revised-schedule).

The surprise isn’t that he wakes up.

It’s that Steve, the _small and skinny_ Steve from the shadows of his memories, is sitting right next to him.

“What the hell?” Bucky mutters. He distinctly remembers the peculiar tingle that was his body disintegrating to ash; remembers the brief panic before there was just _nothing_.

Steve turns his head, a sad smile on his lips. “I told you, Buck. ‘Til the end of the line.”

Bucky stares. “Right,” he says slowly. Without looking, he clenches his left fist, and listens to the plates on his arm shifting to compensate. It does nothing to settle him.

He studies the strange water world they’re sitting in, the horizon red with the setting sun. It’s all he can see for miles. He doesn’t want to name this place, doesn’t want to ask what the hell Steve is doing here and like _that_ , because he’s afraid he already knows.

“Relax, Buck.” Steve says, and because he’s an asshole, he manages to answer anyway. “It’s all over now.”

His jaw tightens.

“So that’s it then?” The words are almost bitter as they tear from him. They’d fought so hard for so long, the both of them.

“C’mon, look where we are!” Steve says, slapping a hand onto the water. “We gave it our best shot and we lost, Buck. There’s nothing we can do anymore.”

Bucky stares at him again, because _what the hell?_

He pushes to his feet suddenly, ignoring the protests as he splashes all over Steve. Steve _,_ who would _never say that_. Steve, who attempted to enlist _no less than six times_ and then went and _subjected himself to experimentation_ in order to overcome his limitations. Steve, who _went against the world_ and _started a superhuman war_ and refused to back down for Bucky, who wasn’t even worth it.

Steve, who had been fighting since 1943 and had never really stopped.

Their roles are absurdly reversed.

_It’s not over_ , he thinks as he begins to walk away. It can’t be. He doesn’t know what they can do, but doing nothing feels more terrifying.

“Bucky!” Steve cries, scrambling to his feet after him. “Come on, Buck! We’re dead. We died! It’s over.”

Bucky stops.

“It’s over,” Steve repeats quietly.

He clenches his fist again, but the uneasiness only grows.

If he’s dead and he deserves this for all he’s done, then why is Steve here? It’s not right. Steve doesn’t belong here.

_Purgatory,_ he thinks with a slight shiver. No, of all people, Steve can’t possibly be here, and if Steve can’t be here, then this wasn’t Steve…right? It must be a figment of his imagination, or a purgatory thing.

He turns back, stops.

Steve has an almost peculiar expression on his face, head slightly tilted as he stares at Bucky. It’s one he doesn’t recognize.

“You know, I thought it’d be easier with you, what with all the gaps,” Steve, or maybe not-Steve says, sighing. “The others were much more accepting.”

He moves before he even registers the thought, a silent snarl curling his lips. Sure-as-hell-not-Steve dangles on his toes, calm even as metal fingers tighten around his skinny throat.

The uneasiness blows into full blown nausea, because those are still Steve’s trusting blue eyes staring back at him.

“Start talking,” he growls.

“What if I don’t want to,” not-Steve asks. “Are you going to snap my neck, Soldat?”

Bucky barely keeps from flinching, but he forces his fingers to uncurl anyway, dropping not-Steve back onto the ground with a splash.

“Please,” he says lowly, flexing metal fingers and carefully staring past the man on the ground. “Tell me what’s going on.”

Not-Steve looks at him, a shrewd glance that hasn’t got an ounce of Steve Rogers in it. There is something alien behind those eyes. There is a sensation in the pit of Bucky’s stomach that feels almost like fear. He’s not sure what there is to be frightened of any more. He is nothingness, what is left?

_Something_ , his mind tells him. He still has a mind left to think, that means there’s something left to lose.

“I’m not sure how to explain it to you so you would understand,” Not-Steve tells him. “Your mind… it isn’t built to understand certain things.”

Bucky thinks of cryo chambers and alien armies, metal arms that move like they’re still a part of him, the wonders of Wakanda and the travesties of Hydra and he shakes his head with a huff of breath.

“Try me.”

Not-Steve reaches up a hand to grasp around his wrist and Bucky’s world changes. It dissolves around him, everything gone, just like he had dissolved before, and in the place of the world is… everything.

He can’t describe it. The light, the enormity. It is infinity and it is everywhere around him. He looks at Not-Steve and it is like seeing two images superimposed. There is still Steve’s face, the stubborn jut to his jaw and the too-blue eyes as always, and then on top of, behind, around, and through that - all at once - is something that he can’t quite comprehend, apart from the orange glow.

“I told you you wouldn’t understand,” Not-Steve’s voice says. His mouth doesn’t move, the words just exist, like they have always been said. Bucky feels another wave of nausea pass over him.

“I’ll make it a bit simpler for you,” says Not-Steve, and the infinite becomes streamlined, becomes finite, as the shapes and colours and masses around them coalesce into a multicoloured galaxy, like Bucky’s standing in space, surrounded by the stars. And each star is joined to others with gossamer thin threads, all different colours.

Not-Steve is at the centre of the web, a million tiny threads of silky light coming out from him, pulsing slightly. Bucky follows one of them with his eyes, to a star, and then another thread, to another star, this one bright - almost as bright as the star that is Not-Steve, but blue, not orange.

He doesn’t know what brings him to reach out to touch the thread, but his fingers feel drawn to it, he feels drawn to it. So he reaches out to the clear blue thread, his fingers moving slowly, but inexorably. The pull is almost magnetic, like the pulsing of the light matches his own pulse somehow.

“I don’t think you should-” Not-Steve tells him, but then Bucky’s fingers connect.

Bucky Barnes has never been struck by lightning. But he has been electrocuted, sat down in the chair and volts pumped through his mind. It’s the most similar sensation he can think of. But it’s different, too.

That had been simply pain, just agony pulsing through him and the brief knowledge, lost as soon as it was gained, of grief. This is painful, but it is fizzing, powerful in a way that gives, rather than taking. It flows into him, rather than out. It brings a heady feeling with it, that there are no limits, that the laws of the universe have faded away. For one, brief, pulsing second, he is everything and everyone, he is all the stars and all the threads and he understands. For one second, he understands.

Then it is gone. The burning and the gasping and the pain, the wonder and the awe and the exhilaration, gone again, leaving just him. Bucky Barnes. In the end he’s always left standing.

He looks down at his fingers, they’re still tingling, and he rubs them together.

Not-Steve is looking at him, alarmed. Or as alarmed as an infinite being can be.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” it says.

“Ain’t that the story of my life,” Bucky tells the being with a wry grin. ‘ _Or my death now, I guess,’_ he thinks.

‘ _What?’_

Bucky blinks. That voice didn’t come from him.

He looks at Not-Steve.

“Did you say that?” he asks. Not-Steve shakes his head.

“I didn’t say anything.” Not-Steve tells him.

_‘Repeat after me,’_ the voice in Bucky’s head says. _‘There’s no such thing as ghosts.’_

—

There’s a fine line between grief and insanity, and Clint thinks he’s definitely crossed that line. He’s starfished on a bed in a four-star hotel trying to convince himself that he’s not about to be murdered by a vengeful spirit. All he wanted to do was forget the look on Laura’s face when he said he had to go to Germany. He was mostly managing.

_‘There’s… no such thing as ghosts,’_ the voice in his head mimics back.

He jerks around trying to see where it came from, and all he gets for his troubles is the tendons in his neck nearly snapping. Not only is he hearing things, but now it’s _making fun of him._ Part of him knows that he probably deserves it, and that his solitary quest for unsolicited vengeance was bound to drive him to this point. But that doesn’t make it any less unsettling. It doesn’t make it any less of a reminder of the last smug voice that had forced its way into his brain and turned him inside out.

_‘Hello?’_ he tries, just in case it’s something worse than his unreliable mind playing tricks on him.

(Magic. Magic would be worse.)

Clint almost expects it when a timid voice responds with a halfhearted ‘ _hi_ ,’ but that doesn’t make his body jolt any less violently.

Holy fuck, there’s someone in his head.

His bedroom is suddenly too quiet, his heart beating loud in his ears in a way that it hasn’t in months. Not since he stopped reliving the moment he got the news. He grabs his duffle bag from underneath the bed and storms out of his hotel room, trying to school his expression into something that doesn’t look like panic and anger mixed into one. Clint makes it all the way outside, into the dull lights of Amsterdam at night, and halfway down the street before he stops. And he realizes. He has nowhere to go. He hasn’t technically had anywhere to go in two years. But now, in the pouring rain of a city that’s a million miles from home, he’s devastatingly alone. He’s out of places to escape to. If he could only call Natasha–

Out of the corner of his eye he sees - or, he thinks he sees - the shadow of a person he hasn’t seen in years. The reason that he hasn’t seen his friends in years. The reason he went to Germany in the first place, Clint thinks bitterly. His eyes go wide and in a flurry of scarce passersby, he’s gone.

_‘Clint Barton!?’_

Clint jumps nearly a foot in the air. “Oh, _fuck_!” he shouts. He’s shouting in the street. A group of people give him worrying looks, but keep walking in true city-dweller fashion. He gives them smiles, trying to shake the shock out of his body.

_‘Who the fuck are you get out of my head what are you doing why is this happening–’_

_‘Oh my God, please calm down, you’re giving me a headache.’_

_‘Who the fuck are you!?’_ Clint thinks as aggressively as he can, stumbling into a alleyway for some semblance of privacy. His clothes are soaked through and his teeth are chattering and there’s _someone in his head again_. Again. He hates this. It sits like a brick in his chest. He’s trying so hard to keep his breathing even, to not have a public panic attack in the middle of the night.

_‘It’s Bucky,’_ the voice says, _‘Bucky Barnes._ ’

—

_‘So...how have you been?'_

The tendril of thought is tentative, almost nervous. Most likely because Clint hasn’t said, or _thought_ , anything for awhile.

He should get out of the rain. Get warm. Maybe breathe. But shit. _Shit._

_‘I don’t know where I am, or what really happened…You know what went down in Wakanda? Or Steve, is Steve okay?’_

The bubbling panic in his chest suddenly twists into fury, because those two, it’s always all about Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes, and fuck everyone else.

_‘Shut the fuck up. Get out of my head, Barnes! Do you hear me?? Get the fuck out!’_

The fury fizzles out as fast as it comes, grief reclaiming its place. He stifles a near sob at the ever familiar weight.

_‘Listen, pal. I don’t want your thoughts either. It just happened, okay?’_

No, it wasn’t okay. It was so far from okay.

_‘I said shut the fuck up!’_

Clint pushes himself up and moves. Up and up. He’s not doing this again. He’s not. He’ll be no one’s pawn again. Not even Bucky Fucking Barnes’. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knows he’s overreacting, that he hasn’t had a decent amount of sleep for at least seventy-two hours, and he’s barely eaten anything substantial aside from basic proteins and electrolytes.

He’s on the ledge before he knows, staring down at the street.

_It’ll be over, done._

The thought is unbidden, loud in the sudden quiet of his mind.

_‘What?’_ Barnes thinks at him, a hint of suspicion coloring the thought. _'What are you doing, Barton?’_

Clint laughs at nothing.

_‘Doing what I do best. Jumping off buildings.’_

_‘What the fuck?!’_

Pain lances, quick as lightning, through his brain at the force of the thought.

_‘Are you out of your mind?!’_

“Maybe,” Clint whispers, then amends. “Probably.”

_‘Look pal, I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m not here to hurt you or—or, whatever the fuck you’re thinking about. Come on, Barton. Clint, don’t do anything stupid.’_

“Just shut up,” he whispers, then thinks, _'Just shut the fuck up. I don’t want you here.’_

_‘Look, look! If you promise to just—just_ hang on _for a second. I’ll find out what’s going on. I’ll do my best to—to give you some space, okay?’_

He exhales at the sincere concern he can feel in that voice. He’s being stupid, he knows. He can’t rest until they’ve all paid for what they’ve done. He knows that.

_‘Bar--Clint? Okay?’_

Dropping back, he slumps down on the roof. Nat would kick his ass if she’d known what he was just considering. He’s so tired.

_‘Come on pal, I promise, I’ll give you space. Don’t do anything stupid.’_

He’ll sleep first, and maybe deal with everything else later.

—

“I did tell you not to touch it,” Not-Steve says.

Bucky doesn’t pause in his pacing as he glares.

“What the hell even happened? How? Why?” Bucky growls, throwing his hands out. “And for chrissakes, stop looking like Steve. It’s disturbing.”

The being actually _pouts_ at him. It’s a weird expression on Steve’s face. It sighs when he continues scowling back at it.

A flutter of anxiety rolls through him as the image of Steve dissolves. It flips to frustration when the entity reforms into another familiar face. The image of Natalia, barely out of her teens, is grinning at him and tossing flaming red hair over her shoulder. It clashes with the solemn and deadly ghost in his memories.

Bucky exhales. What even is his life? Or death. Fuck it.

“Tell me what happened,” he repeats, slowly. “Am I actually communicating with Barton?” Barton, who he barely knew and could count on one hand the number of times he’d spoken to him. Barton, who was clearly off his rocker, and had repeatedly told him off and stopped communicating. Clint Barton. Amazing Hawkeye. What the _hell_. “And why him?”

The being twirls a red curl around its finger, a wistful smile sliding across its lips.

“Why don’t you keep talking to him? You might find out.”

“Talk to--He won’t--,” Bucky stops, frustration bubbling over. He really wants to hit something.

“Just talk to him,” it repeats, a strange smile still on its face.

—

There’s an absolute stillness between the intent to kill and the act of killing, and Clint is fighting, literally, to stay there.

He doesn’t want to deal with anything else. He’s really good at not dealing with things. He’s got so many other things to do that don’t have anything to do with Steve’s dead best friend, and he’s doing some of them right the fuck now.

Although, if he lets himself think about it, it’s just weird enough to be true and really, that opens a door to all sorts of fascinating questions. But he doesn’t let himself think about it, because the enemy aren’t going to burn themselves down and wreck their own operations, and shit, fuckhead #4 really has to go before he reloads.

He lunges forward in the lull between gunshots and his blade slides home, twisting slightly before it’s retracted and he’s moving to the next would-be corpse.

There’s no quarter here, no forgiveness--not for any of them and sure as hell not for him. But maybe when he’s done, maybe when every last son of a bitch responsible is dead, _they_ can rest.

He falters as the image of a _dead man_ flickers at the corner of his eye, and twists quickly, but can’t avoid the fist that slams into his cheek or the body that follows it. The copper taste of blood explodes across his tongue as his head impacts the wall he’s suddenly up against. The guy pulls back to follow up with another roundhouse, but Clint’s katana has already found its mark.

The guy chokes, disbelief written across his face as his fingers scrabble against body armor in a desperate attempt to keep upright. Clint shoves him away and watches passively until he stills.

He exhales heavily, fingers flexing on the hilt as he shakes off some of the adrenaline. The facility is quiet now, its skeleton crew on their merry way to hell. He starts the countdown and gets the hell out of dodge.

He’s about three degrees from hypothermia by the time he makes it back to the safehouse. He makes it through a hot shower and fourteen shoddy stitches, twenty-seven gazillion pages of just-acquired enemy intel that yields the location of two facilities and one base of operations, and a half-thawed bag of peas and a ham sandwich before he’s interrupted again.

_‘Barton?’_

Clint scowls down at his half-eaten sandwich. It’s been almost eight hours since first contact and the subsequent silence after his third definitely _not_ hysterical shut-the-fuck-up and definitely-not-serious slightly suicidal moment. He debates repeating it again – the vehement shut-the-fuck-ups, not the possible suicide.

_‘Come on, Barton. You done freaking out yet?'_

He seriously debates it. Better yet, he should just pack his shit and head to the next facility. It’s only a single plane hop and nine hour flight away.

Instead he crosses his arms and glares furiously down at the table.

_‘Seriously, pal. I need you to work with me here. Please.’_

And he’s sagging, suddenly, plate clattering as he hunches over the table, fingers buried in his hair. It’s the please that does him in. The thought of a pleading Winter Soldier. What a hoot. His cheek starts throbbing again, peas slouched sadly at his elbow.

“Fuck,” he says, throat tight. He doesn’t fucking want it. Whatever the fuck this is, he doesn’t fucking want it.

Clint exhales slowly, counts to a hundred, and does it again.

He straightens tiredly, rubbing a hand over his face. What the hell.

_‘Yeah,’_ he thinks at Barnes, _‘I’m here.’_

—

Bucky can hear layers in those words, he can feel sadness and this bone deep weariness that he’s all too familiar with. He sinks down onto the ground, stretches one leg out in front of him and thinks.

Just when he wants words, when he wants a thought to come, they dissolve into nothingness. He spends all his time with the thoughts crowding into his brain, pushing at him, refusing to let him rest for hours at a time, days sometimes… not that time has much meaning here, wherever here is.

He just needs one thought to communicate.

_'What happened?'_ he thinks, because that’s the big one right there. He remembers dying, but he doesn’t remember how or what. He remembers reaching out to Steve and feeling himself… disappear.

_'Fucked if I know,'_ Barton replies, bitter, but underneath it there’s a whirlpool of other words, phrases.

_Dead_

_Not until they’re all gone_

_Lost them_

_Murdered_

_Justice_

_Oh god oh god oh god_

_Blood_

_My fault_

_No way back_

_Should have been there_

Buck blinks, trying to make sense of it all, overlaid as it is; pieces of sentences, half thoughts, all filled with this echoing nothingness. He considers for a moment saying ‘ _no, what happened to me?’_ But he can’t bring himself to do it.

_'Wanna tell me about it?’_ he asks instead. And on the other side of the link, something breaks, something shatters like a mirror and a story comes pouring out. Secrets that weren’t kept, predators hunting him down, hunting down a family.

It’s the sort of tale that makes Bucky wish he had a drink. The sort of tale that reminds him of the war. He’d known men who returned from the front to find their family dead in the blitz. There’s a savagery that comes from that, from knowing that everything you fought for is already gone, without you even knowing about it.

Yeah, he could really do with that drink. As if by magic - and who knows, maybe it is, Bucky doesn’t understand this place - a glass of beer appears in his hand and when he sips it there’s nothing wrong per se, except for everything. Barton is telling him about his mission now, the determination to see the men who did it dead.

Some of them are already lost, disintegrated just like Bucky, some of them Barton’s already killed, but there are more. That’s how these stories always go. There are always more.

_'What else could I do?'_ Barton asks, a bit like he wants absolution, then, deeper, more viciously, and not quite intentional, a subconscious thought that hacks through their minds. _'Why did you get to survive? What makes you special?’_

“I’ve been asking that question for almost a century, Barton,” Bucky tells him with a weary sigh, speaking the words out loud, just to hear something. “And there ain’t a good answer. There’s nothing special about me. Everything is random and there’s no fucking sense in any of it.”

_'It’s not fair,'_ Barton tells him, and Bucky has flashes of the faces of children over the bond.

“No, it really isn’t,” he agrees. “How can I help?”

—

It turns out, having the mind of an infamous assassin in your head is pretty damn useful when you’re trying to assassinate people. Who knew? Clint’s so used to his own way of doing things, so stuck in his ways, that the second thoughts that Barnes provides open everything up in a million different ways.

And it helps… to have someone to talk to, even if he is a ghost. It helps to not be sitting there alone, eating another crappy tasteless meal in another house Thanos left empty.

There are so many of them these days. Whole floors of high rise buildings as empty as the Marie Celeste. The Earth is half ghost town, although from what Clint can tell, he’s the only one with an actual ghost.

He should tell Rogers, or Natasha, but he can’t bring himself to talk to them. Not when it was their actions that brought this down on his head. Or… maybe it’s because he can’t stand to see the look in Captain America’s eyes when he realises how much blood is on Clint’s hands. Clint can’t regret it. He will avenge his family’s deaths, but Cap has this way of looking at you, making you want to be better, and he’s not ready for that.

So he talks to Bucky in his head, and he hunts down the monsters who are left. Sometimes they aren’t even the ones he’s looking for, sometimes it’s just people who are taking advantage of the fear and terror of the new world order.

He can’t avenge everyone, but he can try.

And Barnes keeps him company. His imaginary friend. Maybe he’s crazy, or maybe he’s not. But the world’s gone to hell in a handbasket, so why shouldn’t his best friend be a ghost? It makes as much sense as any of the rest of it.

Somewhere in between the death and the empty spaces, they find each other. Clint’s scared. He can admit that, in the quiet, dark night. He keeps moving so the fear can’t catch him, so the echoing loneliness can’t swallow him up. He feels like he’s drowning.

One of the things you notice, is the lack of cars. He’s lived in cities enough to know how they feel, to know how they sound, an instinctual knowledge that you barely even know you know. But there aren’t enough cars on the roads, because there aren’t enough people to drive them. The day they disappeared, the day they went, the number of accidents was so high - planes crashed out of the sky, cars slammed into each other and reared onto the pavements, surgeons disappeared halfway through procedures. It wasn’t just the ones who disappeared, it was also the consequences.

He’s sitting at the edge of a crash site, eating something he can’t name and looking out at a city full of craters, and he he sees Bucky appear beside him again out of the corner of his eye. It’s not constant, this thing they have, but he’s come to accept that it’s real. In a strange way, it’s the only thing that feels real in this whole shit show.

“Are you almost done?” Bucky asks. Clint turns and looks at him, doesn’t have to say the words, because he knows Bucky hears them. He has an all-access pass to the dark recesses of Clint’s brain, of course he hears them. _It will never be done_.

“And you’re okay with that?” Bucky asks, like he knows the answer already.

“I’m doing what needs to be done,” Clint tells him.

“Wakanda was great,” Bucky says out of nowhere. He’s not looking at Clint any more, he’s looking out the filthy window, at the splintered remains of buildings, and the rubble. “I mean, their technology was amazing, but it was great because it was over. I had goats.”

“Goats?” Clint asks, in spite of himself. The most feared assassin in history had goats.

“Yeah.”

“Sounds nice,” Clint tells him – what else do you say to a guy who’s talking about his goats?

“It was,” Bucky agrees. They don’t say anything else, Clint just lets himself be still for a second and think about goats. The fear lingers on the edges of his mind, but it doesn’t consume him.

—

_‘Do you think it’s fucked up? What I’m doing?’_ he asks unceremoniously. He’s lying on the grass of some park in whatever city he’s landed himself in. He says it out loud along with his thoughts, his voice cutting through the eerie silence of a half-populated neighborhood.

Clint imagines Bucky shrugging. _‘Who am I to judge?’_

_‘I didn’t ask you to. Just asked what you thought.’_

_‘You’re doing what you need to do make things right. I did the same thing when I finally got free.’_ He pauses. _‘But to be honest, it doesn’t change much. Knowing they’re dead after what they did– sure, it helps. But it doesn’t fix anything.’_

Clint doesn’t like that answer, so he changes the subject.

_‘Are you actually dead? Is anyone there with you?’_

He feels a sad smile tug involuntarily at the corner of his mouth while Bucky’s voice echoes through his head.

‘ _It’s just me. Sort of. Doesn’t feel like I’m dead, though. It’s something in between. Just like before.’_

Oh.

_‘Oh.’_ Clint knows exactly what he’s referring to without having to ask. _‘I’m sorry. I get it. I know you know. And I know you know that I don’t really get it. But I get it. You’re alive and you know it but you’re also aware that’s it’s not really living at all if it’s not really you.’_ He sighs quietly. His heart has taken up a tempo that he can’t keep up with. _‘Hope you’re not going too stir crazy. Steve’s gonna figure it out. You know if he knows you’re out there somewhere he won’t rest until he’s got you back.’_

Clint imagines that he can hear a soft laugh on the other end.

‘ _Yeah.’_

Then it’s quiet and all he can hear is his breathing until it makes his skin crawl.

Why is it him anyway? Of all the people left on earth for Bucky to get stuck in his head, why him? Why not Steve, if anyone?

‘ _I don’t know if I could handle Steve in my head right now. Or ever.’_

Clint sits up on the grass. _‘Oh… Are you– You’re okay with this, though? We don’t even really know each other. And you’ve probably had enough people messing with your head for like… ever. I hope I’m not making it worse.’_

_‘It’s fine. Besides, I think I know you well enough by now.’_

Clint hates everything about that statement. He gathers his gear from off the grass and tries to ignore the sting in his leg from the cut that’s hopefully not bleeding anymore. Once he’s relatively safe in the confines of the apartment he’s borrowing, he digs his phone out from the bottom of his bag. His thumb hovers over Steve’s name for longer than he cares to admit before he actually lets himself press it. But once he does, the voice in his head is shouting.

_‘Don’t!’_

Clint’s finger hangs up as he startles.

“Seriously!?”

Standing in front of him is Bucky Barnes with a panicked look on his face, his hands held out in front of him.

“No,” Clint says decisively, shutting his eyes tight. “Go away.”

When Clint opens his eyes, Bucky is still standing there.

—

Now Bucky’s more there, to Clint at least, it’s simultaneously better and worse. Worse because Clint might legitimately qualify as insane now. Better because when Clint wakes himself up screaming in the middle of the night, there is someone there to sit with him, tell him to breathe, talk him down. Someone who doesn’t judge the tears that run down his cheeks, who doesn’t comment when he scrubs his hands half-bloody in the motel sink.

“You asked me whether I thought what you’re doing was fucked up,” Bucky says. Clint thinks that if he could, Bucky would be leaning against the doorframe in the pokey motel bathroom. “Think it’s more your opinion that matters.”

“You told me that you liked Wakanda because it was over,” Clint replies. “It’ll be over soon.”

“Are you gonna last that long?” Bucky asks, because the bastard can’t stop himself from reading Clint’s stupid brain.

“I’m good at hanging on,” Clint tells him. “Na- Nat says I’m like a barnacle…” he feels a pang when he says Natasha’s name, guilt and fear all mixed up in his gut. Bucky doesn’t reply, though, doesn’t think a thing, just watches Clint. “I’ll be fine, Barnes. I’m an Avenger.”

“You’re too good for this shit,” Bucky says finally, then evaporates, as if he was never there at all.

—

Bucky doesn’t bother to keep his opinions to himself after that. It would be refreshing if it wasn’t so annoying.

“Shut the hell up,” Clint says through clenched teeth.

Really, it’s one thing to have a ghost in your mind, and it’s entirely something else to have him hovering over your shoulder as you go around stabbing people.

“That is _not_ how you hold a knife!” Bucky sounds horrified, but Clint can’t be assed to look. “Seriously! Who taught you?”

He drops the body and whirls, pointing his knife at Bucky.

“Seriously, Barnes!?”

He has to keep himself from tensing almost reflexively, because that’s the Winter Soldier with a mutinous expression, arms crossed as he glares at the body between them.

“What even is this?” Clint hisses, not a hint of defensiveness, cause his knife technique is _fine_. “First you’re in my mind _talking to me_ and now you’re, like, _here_. What the hell is next?!”

Bucky gapes before sweeping a hand out angrily. “You wanna talk about this _now_? You didn’t wanna maybe talk about it say, three hours ago before you went on this stupid mission? When you were just ignoring me like the dumbass you are?!”

“Stupid? What the hell, Barnes!? What happened to no judgement?!”

“That was before I saw you in action,” he replies, scowling. “How are you even alive? No,” he interrupts as Clint opens his mouth. “Shut the fuck up and get going. We’ll talk about this later.”

Briefly, Clint debates the merits of throwing the knife at Bucky’s head. On one hand, it’ll make him feel better. On the other, it would just go straight through and probably get damaged on that siding.

Huffing, he turns away and stalks further into the compound.

—

“You need to stop this,” Bucky says, later, as Clint bleeds out on the floor of the random house he’s crawled into.

"Sure," Clint halfheartedly agrees, groaning as he applies more pressure to his side. So he's ruffled some feathers. Big deal. At least his head's worth a cool quarter mil these days. Nat would be so proud.

“I’m serious.”

He sighs and closes his eyes. “I know you’re serious. That’s a very serious face.” He can _feel_ the scowl directed at him. It’s almost edging out Steve’s in the do-not-cross-me category. It stirs something inside him, that there's yet another person who gives a shit about whether he lives or dies.

“Come on, Barton.” Bucky’s voice snaps him out of the torpor he’s fallen into. “Get up and take care of that.”

“Yeah, yeah,” He mutters, and only gives himself a second to prepare before he’s pushing upright. “Fuck” he hisses. “Fuck! Ah fuck, that hurts!” It takes a full minute to uncurl enough to stagger off and find a bathroom and something to suture.

—

Bucky Barnes is sure of two things: One, Clint Barton is an unmitigated disaster, and two, he’s clearly got to find a way back because who else is going to watch that moron’s back.

He opens his eyes and looks around, but the being is nowhere to be seen.

“Hello?” He calls, and positively does not startle when it’s suddenly there in front of him. It’s a brunette now, with wide, soulful eyes and a cheerful, mischievous grin he vaguely recognizes.

“Tell me where we are,” he demands, “and tell me how to get back.”

The grin fades.

“I’m sorry, Bucky Barnes, but it’s just not possible.”

“Given what I’ve seen lately, ‘impossible’ don’t mean a lot,” he says.

This place, the way it works, he doesn’t understand. He’d call it impossible, but here he is, standing in a place that shouldn’t exist. He’s connected through something he can’t even begin to understand to someone else in a way that should, by all rights, be impossible too, but it’s true. All of this is true - either that or Hydra made more of a mess of his brain than he realised.

No, he spent too long clawing back his sanity to doubt himself now. He has to trust himself, especially now, when there’s no one else to trust - except maybe Barton… Clint. But how can Bucky expect anything from him when he’s so clearly lost.

He draws in a deep breath, if there’s even any air here, and looks back at the person looking back at him.

“You have to stop what you’re doing, James,” it says, solemn now, and its face is shifting again, softening, going younger, more feminine, until it’s his sister, his little sister looking back at him with her big brown eyes. She reaches out to take his hand. “You have to stop, it was never meant to work like this.”

“Work like what?” he asks.

“The connections won’t hold,” she says. “The nexus is fractured.” Words that Becca would never have said, though her hair’s in the same pigtails he’d always threatened to cut off when she annoyed him. God, it’s good to see her, even if it’s not really her. He stares at her so long he thinks his eyes will fall right out of his head.

But Becca’s not here. Becca’s old, her face filled in with the lines of a life well-lived. He’d gone to see her once, from a distance, at the retirement village where she lives. She’d been dancing.

But no - that face is stolen, a trick, a ruse to keep him from prying, to stop him from doing what he has to do.

“What does that mean?” he asks. “What does it mean that the nexus is fractured?”

“We were made so long ago,” Becca says, her voice echoing with something that sends chills through his body. “We crystallised into our current form. The nexus is what connects us all. If it is destroyed then… we are destroyed.”

“And what happens then?” Bucky asks. “What does that mean?”

“It has been a long time since we were united,” Becca’s mouth says with the otherworldly voice that vibrates through Bucky’s bones. “Our power was used to alter the universe, at a fundamental level,” she goes on. “That which was no longer… part of the universe, was absorbed into us.”

“Like me,” Bucky says. “I’m inside whatever you are?”

“After a fashion,” Becca says, looking around. “You all are.”

“Who’s that?” Bucky asks.

“Everyone who ceased to be. All–” she says a number, a number so huge that Bucky’s brain cannot understand what it even means. All he understands is enormity “– of you. You were absorbed, and the nexus held.”

“But now it’s not holding,” Bucky says. He doesn’t even need to ask. How else would this go. “And if it breaks, you’re destroyed, and I’m inside you. So if you’re destroyed then me, and everyone else… we’re gone. But why are you even telling me that? You… I’ve seen you, the real you, and you can’t tell me something as… powerful as you, cares about whether I exist or not.”

“No,” Becca says. “You are… not significant, apart from the fact that you are accelerating the deterioration of the nexus.”

“You’re scared,” Bucky says. And he knows it’s true as soon as he says it. Eternal, all-powerful being or not, whatever this thing is, it’s scared. He’s seen that look in a hundred people’s eyes. He’s seen that expression in the mirror when no one was watching. He’s seen that look on the faces of men marching to their deaths. “You don’t wanna die.”

“We cannot die,” Becca says.

“I don’t think that’s true,” Bucky says. “I don’t think you think that’s true.”

“You cannot comprehe–”

“Yeah, I can,” Bucky says. “I understand not wanting to die.” He understands the impulse, the wild, desperate thoughts of ‘anything but this’, and he understands what that means. “If I stop using the connection, what happens?”

“The deterioration will slow down,” False-Becca says.

“But it will still happen?”

“Entropy is inevitable.”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Bucky says. He thinks about Clint, out there, clinging onto life and sanity by his fingertips. He thinks about all the beings that are in here with him, wherever they are. He considers it all. “If someone out there got all of you together again, could they… could they undo what got done before?”

“Yes. But the power would be too great to withstand.”

“That means there’s a chance,” Bucky says. “And when you’ve got a chance - you take the shot.”

_‘That’s real inspirational, Sergeant.’_

Out of the corner of his eye, Bucky sees Clint flicker into his end of reality. He’s out of breath, wide-eyed and spooked by Bucky’s appearance just as he was the first time. He turns his head in alarm, hearing a sound that Bucky can’t hear, and starts running.

_‘I hope you heard the rest of that because I don’t know if I can explain it.’_

_‘Yeah, yeah, reality collapsing, devastating stakes. Isn’t that just the usual? Don’t they realize this isn’t exactly on purpose?’_

Bucky is helpless to watch as Clint dives for cover behind something he can’t see.

_‘You have to tell Natasha and Steve.’_

Clint scoffs. _‘Where the hell do you think I’m going?’_

—

“Where did you even find this thing?”

Clint is fiddling with switches and buttons, mostly to keep himself busy while the quinjet warms up. Bucky has been hovering over his shoulder for half an hour and he’s thirty seconds away from trying to punch him just for the hell of it. He’s already shaking with the mounting tension of the past week, waking up feeling as though his heart is being pulled from his chest. Each time, he’d watch the image of Bucky flicker into focus, looking more and more concerned. The journey to New York was already taking a worryingly long time, and it’s a miracle that he found the jet. Even more so that it appears to be fully functional and not at risk of falling from the sky as soon as he takes off.

“I think a more accurate account would be that I nearly broke my nose when I walked into it.”

Being able to take a hint when someone is wound up tight clearly isn’t in the Winter Soldier’s repertoire, because Bucky puts a hand on Clint’s shoulder and sends him falling off of his seat at the contact.

He’s not supposed to _actually be here_.

“What the _fuck,_ Barnes?”

Except, Bucky looks just as startled.

“The connection must be getting stronger.”

He turns around and sure enough Bucky is still standing behind him, frozen in the same position. So Clint reaches back – he just wants to be _sure_ – and takes Bucky’s hand, places it back onto his shoulder. He has to force himself not to startle again. Because it’s real, more real than anything has felt in a long time and if that isn’t the damndest thing. Clint rearranges himself back into the pilot’s seat, fidgeting despite feeling better knowing he’s not alone. He’s spent so much time alone already. He can’t help but admit that it’s a nice change of pace that Bucky’s almost always around, if not in his head most of the time.

“It’s been one hell of a time getting to know each other, hasn’t it?”

There’s a bit of hysterical edge to his voice, but he can’t help it. It’s just so _nice_ to feel someone else beside him. To feel a touch that isn’t trying to kill him. It’s been so goddamn long being alone and he thinks–

He thinks he’s ready. He didn’t have much choice in the matter to begin with but now it feels more right. Clint gets the quinjet into the air, reveling in the comforting squeeze that Bucky gives to his shoulder.

“Say, you think we could get to know each other for real after Steve gets me out of here?”

“That’s awful optimistic, but sure. Yeah. That might be nice.”

Clint feels Bucky shrug.

“What can I say? It looks like I’ve got something to look forward to now.”


End file.
